They just found an alleged Nazi commander who has spent the last 60 years living about 5 minutes from where I grew up. I"m kind of curious to see what they will do with a 94 year old man. Local reaction is mixed, some say hand him over to the war crimes court for trial....others say why waste resources on trying a guy who may never live to serve a day.

Can they prove this? I mean 94 years old? look what happened to John Demjanjuk. He croaked before they could convict him. and now they're still fighting about whether or not a nurse killed him with a lethal dose of painkillers. I mean there has to be a statute of limitations. If the Simon Weisenthal Center couldn't snag him in what? Almost 70 years then c'mon. Sometimes I think that this whole holocaust thing gets out of control. It wasn't only the jews who were persecuted by the nazis.

Yeah, my question as well. I don't have the details yet and I'm too tired to start googling it, but you either enforce war crimes or you don't. It's not like letting someone off who's too old to drive but they let 'em anyway (which is bad enough).

Well,the war's over, sh*t happens during war, Hitler was stopped, we have other a****les to stop these days, case closed, leave the guy alone. There are more pressing issues. Obviously the guy is harmless. I don't understand why the Jews have this ongoing vendetta. I have relatives who fought the nazis both alive & dead and none of them really talked about it.

It's a morally hard question but I also think that in any conflict, there comes a time when it's best to turn the page, forget and forgive. Otherwise you nurture bad memories, rancor and bitterness which may be the dormant seed for future conflicts.

Oh, right. So it's okay to commit heinous atrocities if you are good at hide and seek and can look harmless @ 94.

Brilliant.

I didn't say it's 'okay', that's why I started by saying that it's a morally hard question.

But you are British so you are familiar with the Irish conflict, I am Spanish so I am familiar with the basque / ETA conflict, we are all familiar with the Israel / Palestinian conflicts or the current discussions in Colombia attempting to finish the nightmare of the guerrillas.

When everybody sticks to the principle that past crimes must be paid for according to standard law, that there can be no turning of the page, no forgiving or forgetting of any kind, such kind of conflicts can be extremely difficult to resolve.

Of course the Nazi conflict is different in that there were winners and defeated, there's nothing to negotiate.

But the point remains, even if morally incorrect, the resolution of bloody conflicts is one of the few cases where I believe that 'the end may justify the means', if some 'immoral' forgiveness can help to solve the conflict once and for all, be it welcome.

As I said the Nazi conflict does not need to be solved anymore, but we don't need to bring it back to the headlines.

No, it's realistic. Seriously what is it going to accomplish at this point. Got another one. High five! If it were just after the war when the Nuremberg Trials were going full tilt then OK. Preventitive measure. At the time it was possible that the guy could have been still harbouring Nazi tendancies. If it were a guy like Eduard Roschman in Frederick Forsyth's Odessa File novel then OK. But this old geezer goes to church, putters in his garden etc. Doesn't make sense to me to go after the guy. A waste of resources and time for something that most people just want to forget about. Certainly it was horrible but it's over now. Like I said we have other maniacs to deal with before they actually do something that will affect the world we live in today.

Oh, right. So it's okay to commit heinous atrocities if you are good at hide and seek and can look harmless @ 94.

Brilliant.

I didn't say it's 'okay', that's why I started by saying that it's a morally hard question.

But you are British so you are familiar with the Irish conflict, I am Spanish so I am familiar with the basque / ETA conflict, we are all familiar with the Israel / Palestinian conflicts or the current discussions in Colombia attempting to finish the nightmare of the guerrillas.

When everybody sticks to the principle that past crimes must be paid for according to standard law, that there can be no turning of the page, no forgiving or forgetting of any kind, such kind of conflicts can be extremely difficult to resolve.

Of course the Nazi conflict is different in that there were winners and defeated, there's nothing to negotiate.

But the point remains, even if morally incorrect, the resolution of bloody conflicts is one of the few cases where I believe that 'the end may justify the means', if some 'immoral' forgiveness can help to solve the conflict once and for all, be it welcome.

As I said the Nazi conflict does not need to be solved anymore, but we don't need to bring it back to the headlines.

There is a big difference between bring to justice someone who committed a crime and the stupidity of applying the biblical maxim of "the sins of the father" to prolong or aggravate an age-old conflict. If they were taking his son to trial then I'd agree with you, but they are not.

This particular case is not nazism vs. judaism, but of the masacre of a whole Polish village (all ages, all sexes, all religions and all credes). There is no racial, religious or teritorial or even ideological conflict here, it's a war crime pure and simple.

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